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Science & Technology

Hadron Collider receives 'heart transplant'

By T.K. Randall
March 5, 2017 · Comment icon 13 comments

The Large Hadron Collider has been upgraded. Image Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 Maximilien Brice
Engineers have fitted CERN's record-breaking particle accelerator with its first major upgrade.
Built between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with more than 10,000 scientists and engineers from around the world, the Large Hadron Collider - officially the world's largest machine - consists of a ring approximately 27km in circumference which is situated near Geneva, Switzerland.

The facility has already achieved much since it began operations, including the discovery of the elusive Higgs Boson - a particle first suspected to exist all the way back in the 1960s.

Now though, in an effort to help scientists make even more groundbreaking discoveries with the world-renowned atom smasher, engineers have installed a new "pixel tracker" to the LHC, an upgrade that will improve its capacity to disentangle and reconstruct the paths of particles.
"It's like substituting a 66 megapixel camera with a 124 megapixel camera," said Austin Ball, technical co-ordinator for the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment.

"There are limits to the camera analogy - it's a 3D imaging system. But the point is that the new system is more powerful at disentangling the effects of having multiple collisions superimposed on top of each other."

It will certainly be interesting to see what mysteries the team can unravel over the coming years.

Source: BBC News | Comments (13)




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Recent comments on this story
Comment icon #4 Posted by Grandpa Greenman 7 years ago
  HOTDOG! Fire it up!!   
Comment icon #5 Posted by geraldnewfie 7 years ago
so what breakthroughs actually helped mankind from this machine so far besides wasting billions of dollars?
Comment icon #6 Posted by badeskov 7 years ago
Uhm, the verification of the existence of the Higgs boson. And possibly the discovery of new physics? Maybe you should educate yourself a little bit.  Cheers, Badeskov
Comment icon #7 Posted by kartikg 7 years ago
Nothing much
Comment icon #8 Posted by geraldnewfie 7 years ago
actually i did educate myself, i read about LHC when it first started construction, the question i asked is what did it do to help mankind so far? finding higgs didnt help us, just wasted money, yes it may have prove that where the universe came from, but yet religion still roams the earth corrupting everyone. I can see if they spent millions on something useful not some garbage that got no use for yet. if they did something useful im sure it would take generations before the public got hands on it. 
Comment icon #9 Posted by ShadowSot 7 years ago
Quantum theory was pretty useless to the average person, but it lead to computers.   You really can't force research, confirming the standard model will have knock on effects down the line.   Most of the technology we take for granted comes from discoveries that initially showed no purpose.
Comment icon #10 Posted by sepulchrave 7 years ago
I am a scientist and I support the LHC. But I agree that asking ``is it worth the cost'' is an appropriate question (again, my answer is ``yes''). But I am curious: What would you rather spend the money on? (Not trying to make a personal attack or anything, just interested where your sympathies lie.)
Comment icon #11 Posted by badeskov 7 years ago
By all means of respect, but you apparently did not educate yourself. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson was a huge milestone, many more to come I am sure.  Utter BS. Please do keep religious nonsense out of this. It has no place here.  Please give the device back that you are writing these posts on. They were based on science like this.  Cheers, Badeskov
Comment icon #12 Posted by Noteverythingisaconspiracy 7 years ago
It comes as a surprise to many people but CERN is a European research organisation. So if you are not from a European country you really don't need to worry about how the money is pent, as you have contributed no money anyway. (Unless you are from Israel which is the only non-European member of CERN.)
Comment icon #13 Posted by docyabut2 7 years ago
 


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